One of the quirky delights of the era of Late Liberalism is watching Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister Marc Miller play the hard-nosed mafia “cleaner” trying to create a semblance of order after a decade of flawed Liberal immigration policy. Miller has now been handed a case of high political temperature with the July arrests of accused father-and-son terrorists from Toronto who were supposedly preparing a murder rampage. The father, who obtained Canadian citizenship sometime after 2015, has been identified as having a documented background as a torturer for ISIS; the son is not a citizen.
Yesterday Miller faced press questions about the case, and you’ve got to give the man credit for doing that while he handles what has become perhaps the toughest, stinkiest job in the federal cabinet. The minister described himself as “disgusted” at the possibility that somebody had taken a very short path from ISIS to O Canada. But he’s “going to get to the bottom” of what happened in his bureaucratic fiefdom, and he added an inherently controversial sentence: “I’m also going to take the next step, which is to start the preliminary work with the evidence at hand to look at whether the individual in question’s citizenship should be revoked.”
You will notice there’s no “by me” at the end of Miller’s remark. Canadian citizenship is difficult to revoke — impossible, in fact, for those who are citizens of no other country, lest they be rendered stateless. But since 1977 it has been possible for dual or multiple citizens who acquired Canadian citizenship during their lives on the grounds that they acquired it by fraud — a provision that has in the past been applied to perpetrators of Nazi war crimes.
There is a period of exception, of course, which requires us to look back at the time of Late Conservatism. In 2015 the Harper government amended the Citizenship Act to strengthen the immigration minister’s power to revoke citizenship, adding new national security grounds to the law. Under the amendments, a dual citizen could have Canadian citizenship withdrawn by ministerial order after being convicted — even by a foreign court — of treason, espionage or terrorism offences, including ones committed as a Canadian citizen.
The right of appeal from the minister was circumscribed severely in the statute. Overall, the amendments were identified as a dramatic step in the direction of making citizenship impermanent for recent immigrants, and arguably toward reviving the concept of exile as an administrative punishment.
As those of you with functioning political memories will recall, Stephen Harper’s changes to the law became the subject of hot controversy, creating sparks at a Munk Debate showdown when Liberal rival Justin Trudeau insisted that “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.” Citizenship, Trudeau insisted, must never have a conditional character. Whatever you make of that axiom, Trudeau’s victorious Liberals threw the Harper national security provisions out of the Citizenship Act.
The new government preserved the state’s pre-2015 right to cancel citizenship for “false representation or fraud” in an application, but it added a proviso for appeal by right to the Federal Court. This means that today’s immigration minister initiates the process for revocation, if he can find evidence of falsehood, but that he is no longer the ultimate decision-maker.
Miller knows all this, whether or not he is hoping you remember it. Nobody’s real concern about the latest accused Toronto terrorists is that the elder of them may have filled out a citizenship application form incorrectly, which is itself a purely speculative possibility. The minister is using the shreds of revocation powers left by (and to) his own government to give the general impression that a terrorist might lose citizenship only for terrorism. But this is a possibility that our prime minister explicitly rejected, and whose rejection he campaigned successfully on. A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, even if he fought for ISIS not long before becoming a Canadian. Right?
National Post